Saturday, 20 June 2015

The art of battling giants

But David said to the Philistine, ‘You come to
me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the
armies of Israel, whom you have defied.

Do you ever feel, like me, that the church is somewhat
the underdog today? What with falling numbers, rising bills and the slow
onslaught of secularism, we can feel perhaps that the giants are just too
many.

If that’s the case, the story of David and Goliath has
much to teach us. We know the story from Sunday School and as a stand alone
tale it tells us of victory for the little man – victory for the one who
trusted in God, despite appearances suggesting his imminent defeat.

Most of us will not be called upon to battle a giant, at least not a literal one. So how can we take this is as God’s
encouraging word for us today in our situation? We can take the template of the
story and see what it can teach us, bit by bit, about 'the art of battling
giants'. *

*The phrase is taken from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2013
book, David and Goliath: Underdogs,
Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, a great read, which takes the theme
of the original story to illustrate multiple ways in which underdogs and the
disadvantaged in society have battled against the odds and won, not despite their difficulties but almost because of them.

Gladwell had been a writer many years before he
published David and Goliath but it
was this book he says brought him back to the faith of his childhood:

I realised what I had missed. It wasn't an "I
woke up one morning" kind of thing. It was a slow realisation something
incredibly powerful and beautiful in the faith that I grew up with that I was
missing. Here I was writing about people of extraordinary circumstances and it
slowly dawned on me that I can have that too.

Reading between the lines, what happened during the
writing of the book was that so many of the amazing stories of courage against
adversity were from Christians whose faith had stood up to the most terrible
prejudice or suffering, that Gladwell was faced with something very real that
he felt he wanted to regain, i.e. his Christian faith.

So it’s an important book from an influential
sociologist, and if we know the power of the story of David and Goliath
can bring forth such a personal confession of faith, we know there’s something
(or someone) powerful behind the story.

There are three movements to the story, which I’d like
to take as headings as we think about our own situation as part of a church in
the 21st Century that sometimes feels like the underdog.

1. Know your giants

The writer of the story does not hide the real nature
of the giant; he presents the case realistically. Goliath is enormous, he is
powerful; he is well armed and dangerous. At the end of the section about
Goliath, we read‘When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the
Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid’.

What
does this say to us? Be realistic. Know the culture you live in. Know the
culture your children and grand children live in. Hang around with people and
look, observe. What things are not being talked about? Where is God present and where does he appear to be absent? What things exercise people? What things are
people worried about? Read the papers; be informed about the state of the
church in the community here, and in the wider situation of the 21st
West. It’ll break your heart sometimes; it’ll mean focussing on real tragedy
such as the South Carolina shootings this week. It’ll mean not underestimating
evil. Know your giants: neither live in the past with rose tinted spectacles,
nor despair of the present. Because…

2.
Giants aren’t always what they seem

So Goliath is a terrifying giant. Or so it seems. Here
Gladwell is interesting because he suggests that the very strength and might of
the giant Goliath may have in fact been his downfall. He relies on heavy
armour; David is nimble and has speed on his side. Goliath was a seasoned fighter and thought that David
would come to him in the usual one-to-one combat; he wasn’t expecting a stone to come
winging its way through the air and strike him on the head. Gladwell writes of
the advantage of the seemingly innocuous stone in a sling:

Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli
Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a
typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have
hit Goliath's head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to
penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.

What does this say to us? It perhaps suggests that the
very things that tell us we’re struggling as a church might be the means for us
to fix our hopes firmly on the surprise that God brings, in the form of
unlikely victors.

Yes, secularism is a pervasive force. Yes we have a media that is
suspicious of religion, certainly of Christianity. Yes, to all intents and purposes the people we live
with and work with are getting along fine without God and many people one meets
think they’re the masters of their own destiny.

But look deeper. There is still curiosity about spiritual
experience. There is a hunger for mystery. There is loneliness; there is
marital breakdown. There is illness and people we love die. We are mortal and
none of us knows what’s around the corner. This is true of everyone you meet,
even the very young. Teenage mental illness and depression is rising; fear of
terrorism is high. There will always be a need for a people who know what/Whom
they believe and who can hold out hope. In the Philip Larkin poem, Church Going, after painting a gloomy
picture of an empty church, the poet admits wisely, that despite people
abandoning traditional religion, ‘someone will for ever be surprising a hunger
in himself to be more serious’.

And so we don’t lose heart. We pray for our
neighbours. To pray for your neighbour, you need to get to know your neighbour.
To know your neighbour is to love to your neighbour. If you pray for them, you
will get to love them. If you love them, you will be expressing God’s love for
them, and that way you can be a beacon to Christ. That’s what we’re here for.
And finally…

3. ‘Giants’ are a matter of perspective

After describing Goliath, the writer of 1 Samuel turns
to David. David’s perspective was entirely different to that of his
contemporaries, and to that of King Saul. He could see that the real problem
was not the giant, but the
people’s perception of the giant. He says to Saul, ‘Let no one’s heart fail because of
him’ (verse 32). God eventually chose David over Saul because ‘God looks at the
heart’. David saw that this particular battle was a battle about faith. The
people had lost faith in God to deliver them.

Have we
lost faith in God to renew the church? To grow the church? To provide for the
church?

What
are your giants? We all face personal giants but as a church we don’t make
things better by mourning our fall from a previously assumed superior place in the
cultural imagination. Yes, things are ‘very different’ now, but people have always
said that of their time. We can either be completely unaware of this fall from
grace, which I think by now is unlikely; or over
play it, and I do hear a lot of what might pass for overplaying the tragedy
of this fall. I hear church people wringing their hands about secularisation,
mourning the loss of this and that, instead of getting on and re-imagining what
living the Christ-centred life actually looks like in the 21st Century. It’s all a matter of perspective.

We may
as well come to terms with the fact that Christendom is dead or at least nearly
dead, and let God take us by surprise with his own solutions, which rely on
faith and remembering his power is made perfect in weakness. This is how David
defeated Goliath. His perspective was God’s perspective, and his victory God’s.

‘Why are you so afraid?’ asks Jesus. ‘Do you still have no faith?’ (Mark 4:40).